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March 29, 2024, 07:55:23 AM

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Getting Covid with none of the symptoms AKA shit government advice

Started by phantom_power, December 26, 2020, 09:00:17 PM

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phantom_power

So me and half my family tested positive for Covid on Christmas day (merry fucking christmas) but none of us have the 2 symptoms the government website says you need in order to get a test. My wife only got one because a nurse friend of ours said that they have been recommending anyone with flu-like symptoms to get tested as a precaution. We have had no fever, no dry cough and no loss of taste or smell.

Thanks to the government not updating their advice we have potentially exposed others to the virus without knowing. I can see that as this is the time of cold and flu that changing the advice would lead to much more testing but surely that is preferable to the alternative? Also has the new strain got new symptoms or has Covid always had symptoms other than the "classic" ones?

Still, at least now I feel part of this national fuckomatic shit show

Zetetic



Zetetic

Interesting. I've usually associated the body aches and headaches of flu with a fever, but I'm not sure how bollocks that belief is.

COVID-19 has always had various symptoms that overlap with other respiratory illnesses, yeah.

flotemysost

Yeah, I'm hearing lots about this type of scenario recently. My colleague was telling me a couple of weeks ago that one of the workers at her child's nursery tested positive, so the nursery advised everyone to isolate and for their households to get tested, even if they didn't have any symptoms. My colleague and her kid's tests came back negative, but the husband/dad (who lives with them) was positive, but none of them had any symptoms at all, and would have been none the wiser if not for the nursery alerting them.

It seems pretty clear that those main 2/3 symptoms are no longer really an accurate way of ascertaining if you've got it or not. My local council is advising everyone to get tested, symptoms or not, as cases are pretty bad, but then the NHS website still advises that you should aim to get tested within an eight-day window of getting symptoms, so if you're asymptomatic and can't pin down any obvious time you might have caught it, it's hard to know.

I got a test today after about a week and a half of constant headaches, which I stupidly put down to everything other than COVID (being indoors and looking at screens all day, cold weather, depression, carbon monoxide leak panic) before realising I should probably check that too, but I might have missed the window for an accurate result by now anyway.


Hope you and your family are OK, phantom_power.

phantom_power

When you get the track and trace questions they ask about headaches, sore throat etc. so they seem to know that these symptoms are more common now but they haven't updated the advice. I can see why they say don't get a test if you don't have symptoms because even if you have Covid it might not be detectable yet but they should definitely update the advice to get tested if you have flu/cold symptoms, especially considering the cases are spiking all over the place

Chedney Honks

It's because they're attempting to catch as many as possible with the resources available, rather than catch every case. Telling people to get tested with a headache or sore throat would destroy the test, track and trace capacity which is already very fragile.

One of my relatives has been working for T&T for about six/eight weeks now, I can't remember exactly. Initially, it seems quite steady but it's now fucking bedlam and they're frantically recruiting and training people up. Seriously, if anyone is currently out of work, get on the fuckin track and trace.

olliebean

If you use the Zoe Covid Symptom Tracker App, it covers a larger range of symptoms and you can legitimately get a test if it asks you to without having to lie about which symptoms you have.

Zetetic

TTP capacity is mostly protected by limited public access to testing via the UK portals - to reduce demand downstream, you just limit the available testing slots (but Deloitte etc. isn't very good at this or dealing with unexpected drops in capacity, it seems). We saw this when we tried to improve access to testing in the Valleys and UK Gov tried to strangle this with no notice, earlier in the year.

Or you fuck about with allocation of capacity at the labs to different testing pathways (you can see how Deloitte/UK Gov have screwed home testing sometimes in the last few months, for example, to try to keep test centre turnaround and asymptomatic worker and resident screening throughput high, at a guess).

Tracing still broken in England, anyway, regardless of demand, of course. (Although whether this actually makes any difference, who knows.)

What you would end up doing by widening the criteria is possibly is displacing people more likely to test positive from the limited public testing slots available. (Assuming you think those symptoms are good predictors...)

Zetetic


flotemysost

Thanks all for the insights, that makes sense and is useful to know. I guess I just don't tend to think of headaches (with no other symptoms) as sign of a flu/fever, but I should've made the connection, gahh.

As I understand it (and I might well be wrong), the track and trace process currently relies on individuals contacting anywhere they might have been recently - another friend of mine tested positive on Christmas day, and had a frantic morning trying to call anywhere she'd been while potentially infectious (I think it was a taxi and a couple of pubs/restaurants for takeaway food and drinks). I'm guessing there will be huge numbers of people who don't bother doing this, or indeed aren't able to recall/get in touch with everywhere they've been, especially if they're feeling really unwell at the point of getting their results.

As mentioned, my local council (one of the worst for in London for infections at the moment) is encouraging people to get tested regardless of symptoms, so not sure where that sits with the tracing process. I suppose given that even a quick trip to one of the supermarkets here is basically a slalom run against death at the moment (massively crowded, no cunt wearing a mask properly - if I do have it then that's most likely where from) I guess it's fair to assume that anyone here could have it at any point.

Zetetic

Contact tracing is supposed to work by them contacting you and extracting a contact history. They will then advise possible contacts to self-isolate (and identify possible hotspots):
https://gov.wales/test-trace-protect-your-questions#section-42186

A similar process in England, I imagine,
Spoiler alert
except instead of any of that happening you give a lot of money to Serco
[close]
.

Chedney Honks

They're also recording reported symptoms, presumably to determine when Covid toe or explosive diarrhoea become the fourth symptom to trigger a 'symptomatic' PCR test.


George Oscar Bluth II

They've been so far behind what the actual symptoms are. Remember in April/May time people were begging them to add "loss of sense of smell or taste" and it took forever despite it seemingly being the most common symptom at that time.

Norton Canes

Could a rise in asymptomatic infections be due to a new strain which is more transmissible but less dangerous?

Chedney Honks

Quote from: George Oscar Bluth II on December 28, 2020, 11:55:30 AM
They've been so far behind what the actual symptoms are. Remember in April/May time people were begging them to add "loss of sense of smell or taste" and it took forever despite it seemingly being the most common symptom at that time.

Same with the fucking ventilation. Months and months behind what we were talking about on here based on data from elsewhere.

George Oscar Bluth II

Quote from: Norton Canes on December 28, 2020, 05:01:36 PM
Could a rise in asymptomatic infections be due to a new strain which is more transmissible but less dangerous?

All indications currently are that the new variant is neither more nor less dangerous, but as it's more transmissible more people have it so the effect is worse.

phantom_power

We all had a strange insomnia before any of the more obvious symptoms came out. Is that coincidence or is it something others have experienced?

steveh

Back in the early stages of it I remember the headaches and intermittent fever keeping me awake. Sleep disruption seems to be common afterwards too.

There was a piece this week about Covid and sleep and whether melatonin might help: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/covid-19-sleep-pandemic-zzzz/617454/.

flotemysost

Turns out I don't have covid (but there was a fucking gas leak in my flat after all - so I'm glad I haven't been unwittingly spreading it around, hopefully, just slowly going brain-dead). Will definitely make sure I get a test for any sort of flu-like symptoms in the future though.


Also, off-topic but definitely get the gas lads[nb]Not the FLF ones[/nb] in if you even slightly suspect a leak.